Choices in Videogames

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When you play a video game, any kind of game, do you make decisions based on how you feel, or how you think the character would act?

I know personally, I almost always do things based on how I feel or how I would react. There are a few games where I've been really invested in a character and I let things play out based on how I think they would act. Honestly, I put myself in pretty much any game, even if it's a fully defined character with a backstory and everything, I'm putting myself in that adventure.

That usually doesn’t lead me to the good endings, though, so more often I just hit a walkthrough to tell me what the developer thought was the “right” answer and then go with that until I can’t stand it anymore and go play something else.

Jonman Wrote:
Yes, you can cancel Darksiders, but only by using your Sony Golds. Which, while pretty good, aren't a patch on Zelda.

I'll almost always play how I personally would behave in those situations (i.e. Lawful Good & help everyone out), the first time I play through a game. In the rare circumstance that I play through a story-based game multiple times (I'm looking at you, Dragon Age: Origins), I'll try being a complete assh*le, evil dude, or whatever... but it's honestly a real struggle for me to keep that up, even in spite of the guilty pleasure it gives me.

I tend to revert to how I would respond. The protagonist serving as an avatar.

On the rare occasions I've attempted to play a role for a character it has been quite good, quite interesting. Nevertheless, it's difficult to go against instinct, and thus this has been few and far between.

I have a tendency to go with how I would act/want to act. I think maybe that's because most games that give you a lot of choice tend to go with relatively blank slate player characters. The one game that comes to mind where I made an exception on this was The Witcher 3. Geralt was so much of an established character in my mind that I had to make him do what I thought he would do.

I have taken either approach; for me, it depends upon the game and whether the character whose actions you are controlling has a defined point of view or if they're just supposed to be an avatar for the character. In Mass Effect or Dragon Age games, or Bethesda's games, for example, I generally approach the character as "me" and thus I make choices based on how I feel about the situation. In games where you have choices to make but where there is enough scripting of the character to make clear their point of view--Life is Strange, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Red Dead 2, some (but not all!) Telltale games--I try to play it in a way that is consistent with who I think the character is.

As one example, I recall in Life is Strange: Before the Storm where you're playing as Chloe, there were a bunch of decisions the player could make about Chloe where she could make the smart, mature, productive decision, or she could ditch school/smoke pot/tell off her stepdad etc., and, while I felt the former choices were obviously wiser than the latter ones, I thought it wouldn't be true to her character to choose for Chloe avoid trouble and deescalate conflicts. It certainly helped that it was a prequel and I knew where Chloe would end up by the end of the story anyway.

My biggest obstacle to choice in games with choices is when it seems clear the developer has decided which is the right choice that will be rewarded (usually the 'lawful good' approach). It really takes the fun out of the process if there is an imbalance to the mechanical rewards. For all the criticisms the Telltale games get for having the "diamond" approach, where either choice ultimately brings you to the same destination one way or another, the realization that that's what's at work under the hood is somewhat freeing, as it makes it easier to just choose how I want to see the character express themselves, without worrying about optimizing for the best result. The Dragon Age games have, at times, approached this really well too, where many choices are not so much "good vs. bad" as "please Group A and upset Group B vs. please Group B and upset Group A", which feels more realistic, or at least less optimizable.

It depends on the game and the choice--though in addition to the roleplaying and personal decision-making, there's another stance I sometimes follow, which I guess I could call an author choice: making the choice that I feel leads to the right story.

mrlogical wrote:

My biggest obstacle to choice in games with choices is when it seems clear the developer has decided which is the right choice that will be rewarded (usually the 'lawful good' approach). It really takes the fun out of the process if there is an imbalance to the mechanical rewards.

Yeah, plus good versus evil is a really weak way to split the choices: it leads to really extreme branching (which makes the writing harder) and on top of that it's really only a decision that you can make once. So all of the choices after that are redundant.

It's way better if the game is framed around an actually difficult philosophical question (where your answer can vary based on circumstance) or

mrlogical wrote:

For all the criticisms the Telltale games get for having the "diamond" approach, where either choice ultimately brings you to the same destination one way or another, the realization that that's what's at work under the hood is somewhat freeing, as it makes it easier to just choose how I want to see the character express themselves, without worrying about optimizing for the best result.

I call these "reflective choices" because, while they don't affect the overall plot they do affect how the player perceives the story. That is, rather than being external to the player (in the game) the choice's effects are in the mind of the player, reflecting on it.

Reflective choices feel weaker because 1. the game is less likely to remember the choice or respond to it later (there are some exceptions, but that arguably moves it into a different category of choice) and 2. you can't use it as part of the narrative-choice-support-structure, which is one way reflective choices got a bad name: Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books that tried to use them as if they were load-bearing choices.

Kentucky Route Zero is a master class in how to use reflective choices (among other things: it does a lot of narrative innovation).

mrlogical wrote:

The Dragon Age games have, at times, approached this really well too, where many choices are not so much "good vs. bad" as "please Group A and upset Group B vs. please Group B and upset Group A", which feels more realistic, or at least less optimizable.

Yeah! Ways that I've seen to handle this:

The choices are between different philosophies or ways to approach problem solving (Planescape: Torment)

The choices are between what different characters or groups want (Caves of Qud, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, King of Dragon Pass, etc.)

The choices are ethical/moral/practical problems, but you're an agent of the evil empire and there are no good options (Tyranny)

The game is oriented around a particular ethical dilemma, and the choices revisit that as a theme (Prey)

Frame the choices around a major in-world thematic debate and have all of the characters give different perspectives on that (Pillars of Eternity)

Have the choices embedded in a much larger simulation, where your decision to spare an innocent victim might anger your most powerful duke and plunge the kingdom into a bloody war of succession. (Crusader Kings 2)

Make the choices about getting knowledge about the world (Her Story)

Set up some major driving goals for the characters and have them try to navigate them while both surviving and trying to make choices within a complex system (Papers Please, 80 Days)

Have a ridiculously revolutionary responsive story system that remembers your past actions and can responsively reincorporate them into future character choices and relationships (Heaven's Vault)

And so on. This list could probably be greatly expanded.

Someone said something to me a while back that's stuck with me: why do we think that a power fantasy is choosing good versus evil, when a very real power fantasy is having the power to do go and fix problems in the world around you. That's the real fantasy of Superman: he has the ability to actually right wrongs and save people.

Ultima IV had the main quest be based on your ability to act virtuously, ultimately becoming an avatar of good without compromising, by balancing all of the ethical considerations in perfect harmony. (And then the subsequent games explored the nuances of this without taking away from the Avatar as striving for good.) More games should attempt that.

I tend to make up elaborate backstories for my characters in RPG's, and then make the choices I think they would make.

That said it never appeals to me to make up a backstory for and RP an outright evil character, the nastiest I get is just sort of a mercenary type, so I guess I'm still just playing myself in the sense that my sensibilities are the walls of the sandbox, if you will. I guess some people like to cut loose by RPing a character who's the diametric opposite of their own personality and morals.

I usually prefer the good/evil dichotomy in games. The reason for that is primarily that alternatives usually revolve around that same dichotomy, but the writers think they’re hiding it.

The “Live with your choices” model of games like The Witcher is a good example of what I’m trying to describe, because the consequences of a given choice are still governed by what the writer thinks should or shouldn’t happen based on those actions. Consciously or unconsciously the writer(s) is (are) judging your choices on their private scale of Sith to Jedi, and the results you get are informed by that. It’s just an unavoidable fact of human biases.

I’d rather see the machinery and have everyone be honest about it (Fallout 3) than trying to mask it with a cumbersome multi-faction system where I’m supposed to pretend that the writers aren’t rooting for a particular team (Fallout New Vegas and 4)

It makes it easier to get the ending I want, or to avoid the games that won’t give me the story I want with the choices I’d want to make. Like anything, a binary system can be done well (Undertale) or poorly (Infamous, KOTOR) but, as I said, at least it’s honest.

Jonman Wrote:
Yes, you can cancel Darksiders, but only by using your Sony Golds. Which, while pretty good, aren't a patch on Zelda.

Good stuff here. I came to post and realized I'd pretty much say exactly what mrlogical and others did: based on the game, I make a choice between "roleplaying" or "the character is an avatar."

And, as doubtingthomas396 points out, a lot of popular games handle this really poorly.

A theory: games with binary alignment systems don't generally expect you to choose "evil" except as a second playthrough curiosity. The "evil" choices for badly written games only exist to make you feel good about yourself when you make the "good" choice instead. Because in an interactive medium, it does change your perspective to voluntarily choose "good" instead of being railroaded into it; and by rewarding it, you can very easily feel like it's what you'd do "in real life." I'd prefer a game that generally rewarded "evil" choices: being "good" is usually not easy or rewarding, and we do "evil" because it is temptingly easier. (When it can be boiled down to moral binaries.)

A note on Life Is Strange: they actually manage this well with the final choice of the game. I think they very much expect a certain choice, but, it has to be a voluntary choice to have the full emotional impact.

That is a good point. It hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t supposed to pick the “bad” path, but it was just there for self-congratulatory purposes. That makes Infamous make a lot more sense.

I don’t think that’s the goal of the KOTOR games, though. My main problem with them is just that I disagree that certain paths are “evil.” The first KOTOR game seemed to reward good-intentions-as-imagined-by-a-4th-grader rather than things that would actually lead to good outcomes.

Jonman Wrote:
Yes, you can cancel Darksiders, but only by using your Sony Golds. Which, while pretty good, aren't a patch on Zelda.

I'd say I'm likewise amenable to the needs of the game--the more strongly defined the character, the more concern I give to their needs, and the less strongly defined, the more I'll define them myself. In a lot of my Bioware first runs, I often settle into something that feels like a fusion of myself and John Crichton, astronaut, Master of the Universe. I've recently crashed out on the Bethesda style, as it's increasingly clear they don't give a sh*t, so I'm not going to even bother with them anymore.

Life is Strange is a really interesting case because, personally, I was concerned with what I wanted and what I thought the characters would do, but also with what I thought the story should say, what the final thematic statement should be, and what I wanted the characters to take away from their experiences moving forward. That's an often underserved and underconsidered aspect of choice and agency--this is, better or worse, not just character shaping, but interactive storytelling, and what do you want that story to be about? There's a video out there that, among other things, criticizes the choice aspect because "everyone just reloads to see the other path," but, wrong, I don't. That's not my story, I don't need to see it.

Infamous is literally "Do you want to be a superhero or supervillain?" I guess marketing might have made it seem like something else, but the two-sided coinness of it never bothered me. That's just superheroes. The fact that so many confuse Thanos being well characterized with "Hey, maybe an act of unthinkable genocide could be a good thing, there's some nuance here!" is weird.

I'd also like to point out that I put myself in games that don't allow choices also. Obviously sports games fall into this category, but things like MGSV, or Final Fantasy games. I may not have any agency, but it helps me get more into a game. I think Watchdogs 2 was a big one for me where I didn't want to be a murderous crazy guy, so I made sure that I didn't kill anyone unless they attempted to kill me first.

doubtingthomas396's mention of good intentions reminded me of another aspect: it can sometimes be hard to tell what the choice actually does before you choose it. When I'm paralyzed by a choice in a game it is usually not because it is a hard choice or something like that; it's much more often because I don't know what the consequences actually are.

The big obvious example of this is stuff like Mass Effect's actual dialog being different from the label on the button, but even if the text was exactly as written I have to guess how it will be delivered by the character and how the other characters will react.

That's one reason why I like Planescape: Tormet's labels (LIE, TRUTH, BLUFF, etc.) and Tyranny's hypertext popups. Clarifies some of the writer's intent so I have a better anticipation on what the choice actually means.

Of course, it's often difficult or impossible to predict long-term consequences of choices (and that's one reason why people play the games). That's one reason why middle-of-the-road dialog options can be really unsatisfying for me: I feel like I don't have enough information to choose yet, but the non-committal choice is usually worse than either of the other choices or I get locked into a path I wasn't ready to commit to.

I’m totally with Gremlin on this one. When you can’t tell what the choice your making is going to do— near term— then it’s hard to make a choice. Like in that Rockstar game that took place in LA— I forget the title, but they were going for a 1940s film noire aesthetic— where you could choose to believe someone, not believe them or doubt them. I wasn’t sure if someone was telling me the truth, so I chose doubt; because that’s literally what doubt means; and suddenly my character was in this grieving woman’s face telling that he’d run her in if she didn’t start telling the f***ing truth!

It took me right out of the game, and I stopped playing it at that point because I didn’t want to be screwed over because my character was an unstable mess who wouldn’t do what I told him to do.

Jonman Wrote:
Yes, you can cancel Darksiders, but only by using your Sony Golds. Which, while pretty good, aren't a patch on Zelda.

I'm currently playing Mass Effect: Andromeda where responses are prefixed with icons that signify tone. I appreciate this as I believe the how is as important as the what, if not more so.

VG24/7 wrote:

There are four tone dialogue icons in Mass Effect Andromeda, although often you’ll only be given a choice of two. The four possibilities are:

Emotional dialogue icon
A small heart always shown in the upper left of the conversation wheel, emotional conversation options are for those who wear their hearts on their sleeves, showing empathy and sympathy – but also sometimes anger and disgust. If you want your Ryder to be driven by their passions and open with their feelings, this is the path for you.

Logical dialogue icon
A cog wheel symbol in the upper right of the conversation wheel, logical conversation options are pragmatic and to the point, efficiently communicating Ryder’s intentions and needs. Ryders who choose this option get things done no matter what distractions arise, but they can seem a little cold and calculating.

Casual dialogue icon
A spiral in the lower left of the conversation wheel, casual conversation options allow Ryder to joke around, lightening the mood and deflating swollen egos. This is for Ryders who face the world with a smile and see everything as an adventure.

Professional dialogue icon
A spiral made of right angles in the lower right of the conversation wheel indicates a professional conversation option. These Ryders get the job done, and approach others with a formal courtesy that some may appreciate, and others find a bit stiff.

In a video game this approach allows me to control intent as a compromise to the exact choice of words. I feel better about responses, both in understanding prior to selection, and with less regret should the recipient grumble with discontent. It provides a greater illusion of control. I dig it.

In reality there are folks with a strict literal understanding, and folks with an adaptive figurative understanding. Not everyone has both. (And these same people write the characters in our video games, our television shows.) This is where modern outrage culture comes from. (Especially across the internet.) Things read differently in many ways to many people. Person A thinks they've communicated with 1, 2, 3. Person B reads it as 7, 8, 9. Confusion. Conflict.

In Mass Effect: Andromeda I tend to select Professional and Logical most often. In that order. Emotional in select instances, not overly often. And almost never Casual. There's a character, Liam, who is effectively the opposite, and he drives me crazy. It's all quite interesting, though, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the journey.

I did like that about Andromeda, as well as the little heart icon that popped up for romantic options, so when I was trying to winnow my way into Vetra’s affections I knew what ones I could pick.

I wish I had that option in real life. As a non-neurotypical person i find that people are constantly reading emotional content into my words that I literally don’t know I’m putting there.

I try to compensate by using extremely specific words, but that just puts people off because I end up using words that people don’t understand. So they read emotional content into that, and ask why I’m being snotty (or whatever) when I’m just trying to be precise.

It’s extremely frustrating.

Jonman Wrote:
Yes, you can cancel Darksiders, but only by using your Sony Golds. Which, while pretty good, aren't a patch on Zelda.

I did like that about Andromeda, as well as the little heart icon that popped up for romantic options, so when I was trying to winnow my way into Vetra’s affections I knew what ones I could pick.

Yes. That one escaped my mind along with another that indicates best friends, or a special friendship. I believe it occurs with Jaal.

I appreciate the romantic icon so as not to stumble into situations I'd very much rather avoid. Both for my uncomfortable squirming as much to avoid hurting another's feelings. I have enjoyed the interactions with Cora following the romantic icon responses. Vetra, too. Peebee less so. It helps see another layer of someone's personality to then pivot towards to or away from. Or even ignore altogether across the board if entirely uninterested in coupling. Score another for tone indication!

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

I wish I had that option in real life. As a non-neurotypical person i find that people are constantly reading emotional content into my words that I literally don’t know I’m putting there.

I try to compensate by using extremely specific words, but that just puts people off because I end up using words that people don’t understand. So they read emotional content into that, and ask why I’m being snotty (or whatever) when I’m just trying to be precise.

It’s extremely frustrating.

You and me both. I was actually thinking along the lines of communication software for us all as I was wording my previous contribution.

I did like that about Andromeda, as well as the little heart icon that popped up for romantic options, so when I was trying to winnow my way into Vetra’s affections I knew what ones I could pick.

I wish I had that option in real life. As a non-neurotypical person i find that people are constantly reading emotional content into my words that I literally don’t know I’m putting there.

I try to compensate by using extremely specific words, but that just puts people off because I end up using words that people don’t understand. So they read emotional content into that, and ask why I’m being snotty (or whatever) when I’m just trying to be precise.

It’s extremely frustrating.

I remember having a dream a while ago in which my real life self was talking to people and somehow there were character wheels with descriptive options. I think later in the day after I was awake, I tried to click on a character wheel to talk to someone and it came out as some sort of half-gesture. It seemed entirely normal at the time!

As for choices in games, it depends on the character. If I'm really roleplaying the character, I'll choose what they would choose. If I'm just playing just to mow down monsters or collect loot and don't want to bother with a lot of conversation, I'll just choose whatever I would choose.

If I'm really tired, I really don't want to make ANY choices, so tend not to play games that require choices.

Rebecca

“We should be rigorous in judging ourselves and gracious in judging others.” ― John Wesley

In reality: Cheshire in the UK. In game: Taking screenshots beyond number.

I used to, don't have as much time these days, do a play through of a game like Mass Effect reacting as I would if it was me and then, in order to try out other choices, I'd create a motivating back story or philosophy for a new character and play using those things as a guide. In Mass Effect my 'renegade' fem Shep's decision making was based on the fact that she had been tasked with saving an entire galaxy and all the lives within it. As much as she might want to act more carefully and compassionately she could not risk indecision or moral qualms causing her to fail in her mission. She wasn't pursuing purely Renegade or Paragon (it is possible!) she was just doing the most expeditious thing in the moment and weighing the potential fate of a galaxy in the balance.

In Fallout 3 I similarly did a 'me' play through and then my 'father and Son' team were spies from Europe tasked with retrieving the G.E.C.K (garden of eden creation kit) who had to keep their identities a secret at all costs which included killing anyone who might, even remotely, suspect the truth.

I can't play bad options in games with no reason but if my character has a solid logic to their actions I can be true to that and see where that philosophy or set of governing factors takes them.